couragethebravedogWhat's your favorite email client?
gelberhutGmail works fine for me. No need to search for alternatives.
cosmicrookieAfter Gmail merged all the storage limits that you use across all their sevices, I have been looking for an altetnstive. I’d rather pay for a web server to host my mails than google
Self-hosted mail has some pains associated with it in regards to reliability due to major email services rating SMTP servers and tending to not trust personal ones. If moving away from privacy-violating services is your main goal and are open to non-self-hosted alternatives, I'd suggest Proton Mail. They even have a free tier if you want to test the waters. They do have pretty easy migration tools to move away from Gmail as well.
hoodatninjaA thread on HN really poopoo'd proton mail (but not the VPN which I love) and recommended Fastmail over it. I can't recall why so I'll try to dig it up, but just throwing that out there since it might be good to check in on any major cons with it. It wasn't scandals or "they aren't private" or something but it felt significant when I read it.
It's possible that it's the lack of direct compatibility with other clients. Since it's fully encrypted beyond even just OpenPGP capabilities, some are turned off that you can't easily use other clients. Without a lot of effort you are required to use their mobile app or the website. And on desktop, you need to setup their Bridge to be able to use third party clients.
You clearly understand this stuff better than I do, but some of that seems somewhat familiar